Failing states fashioned from Bush’s coat-tails

International policy has failed to keep Pakistan and Palestine from inching closer to the brink: both are potential failed states and both could take their entire region down with them, especially nuclear-armed Pakistan. For once, the intellectually lazy response – to blame it on the Americans – is correct.

The basic American mistake in dealing with Pakistan has been to put all its money on the country’s autocratic ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, and to dismiss a democratic alternative as too messy, an inclination which was magnified once the ‘war on terror’ came along. Indeed, Musharraf’s coup was cautiously welcomed by many Pakistanis who were fed up with the venality of their democratically elected leaders. The relatively brief spells of democracy that the country had experienced since emerging from the partition of India in 1947 had not been especially happy and Musharraf seemed a rather enlightened sort of military ruler. The decisive moment in his relationship with Washington came immediately after 11 September 2001, when the US confronted him with the choice of supporting the Americans’ anti-terrorism campaign or feel the wrath of a bellicose administration bent on revenge.

Musharraf’s choice – since rewarded with more than $10 billion (€6.8bn) in assistance – was sealed in the first personal meeting between the general and President George W. Bush. Pakistan’s earlier support for the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan was forgiven and Pakistan became a stalwart defender of US interests in a region where Western allies are thin on the ground.

But Musharraf overplayed his hand and was unable to translate success in foreign affairs into domestic legitimacy. On 3 November, he declared a state of emergency and sacked judges of the Supreme Court just as they were to rule on the legality of the 6 October presidential poll, which he had won in a landslide election (thanks to an opposition boycott). This prompted only mild rebukes from Washington and Brussels. (The European Parliament watered down a resolution on Musharraf’s state of emergency passed on 15 November, striking out language that would have foreseen targeted sanctions unless emergency rule were lifted.)

As if to sum up the record of his time in office, Musharraf told the Washington Post on 17 November: “I brought democracy to Pakistan and I still believe in it.” But the elections Musharraf has called for early January are unlikely to be free and fair. They will take place in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation, and the opposition under Benazir Bhutto, who returned from exile on 18 October, will hardly have time to campaign properly.

The basic American mistake in dealing with Palestine, by contrast, has been to demand democracy from the crooked and bungling leadership of Yasser Arafat and his cronies – only to turn around when the result was not to Washington’s liking.

The January 2006 parliamentary poll in the Palestinian territories – Gaza and the West Bank – was the first election contested by Hamas, a movement whose main activities until the previous year had been suicide bombings against Israeli civilians and the provision of social services to an impoverished and brutalised Palestinian population. If the former gave it popularity and legitimacy with Palestinians who were disillusioned with a ‘peace process’ that was evidently not going anywhere, the latter made Hamas appear like a good choice to take over the Palestinian Authority, mired in corruption and incompetence and in serious disarray after the death of its charismatic leader, Arafat.

Like Arafat, the Palestinian government was far better at striking poses than at dealing with the humdrum things governments normally have to deal with.

But the victory of Hamas, which to this day remains officially committed to the destruction of Israel, immediately put a stark choice before Western policymakers: recognise the results of a democratic process they had demanded in the first place, or abandon their pro-democracy rhetoric and engage in a bit of realpolitik. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration chose stability over democracy, as it has consistently done in places like Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan (though not, perhaps, in Iraq).

The surprising thing was how uncritically the EU went along with US foreign policy on Palestine – just as it had with regard to Pakistan.

Just days after the Palestinian elections, the so-called Quartet – the United Nations, US, EU and Russia – called on “all members” of a future Palestinian government to commit themselves to non-violence, recognition of Israel and previous agreements such as the road map for peace in the Middle East – conditions that aimed at the core of Hamas’s beliefs and would have been impossible for it to accept publicly, and before it had even formed a government.

A report by the UK’s House of Lords in July found that “the interpretation of the conditions set by the Quartet was undesirably rigid” and urged the British government and the EU to “reconsider the precise formulation of any conditions and to apply them in future with a reasonable amount of flexibility”. Adopting such a stance from the very beginning of Hamas’s rule might have opened the way for a change in the faction’s behaviour and perhaps averted the current crisis.

Today, both Pakistan and Palestine are on the brink of implosion, a situation for which US policies are partly to blame: they were not only intellectually dishonest but, worse still, ineffectual. The EU, uncharacteristically, simply went along with whatever the US was doing, though this may not always have been apparent from the statements made by Union officials. As a result, the EU has been almost completely hamstrung in dealing with either Palestine or Pakistan, leaving policymaking largely to Washington. Instead of putting democracy first, which would have meant getting tough with Musharraf and softening on Hamas, Brussels chose to hang on Bush’s coat-tails. The price is not just diminished influence in two key regions of the world – it is also the continued denial of democratic rights to millions of people.